It was not the first time - publicly or in private - that Enzo Maresca had shared his theory that Chelsea’s young team could come to dominate English football within the next decade.
Indeed, he had told the club’s hierarchy as much when first sitting down to talk about their dugout vacancy in May, before the job had even become his.
He also said it in an interview broadcast on Sky Sports on November 10, less than a month ago, but when the Premier League still felt a different place.
At that stage, Manchester City had lost four matches on the bounce, but across three different competitions with varying levels of consequence, and had an international break ahead to correct what looked a rare blip.
The three results since - effective maulings by Tottenham and Liverpool either side of the implosion against Feyernoord - have been the worst of a winless streak that now stands at seven, and confirmed this is no blip at all.
End of days stuff? Maresca, formerly of Pep Guardiola’s Etihad staff, insists not.
“I don’t think City are at the end of a cycle,” the Italian said on Tuesday, ahead of Wednesday’s trip to Southampton. “I think they are in a bad moment, for sure.”
But it has been protracted enough now to know that something has gone. The champions won’t be this bad all season, but nor surely now will the title be theirs, as it has been with a sense of inevitability for four years on the trot.
The immediate opportunity may well have already been seized by Liverpool, who are nine points clear of Arsenal and Chelsea with a third of the season gone.
But with a City now rebuild due, Guardiola visibly wearied at having just signed on for a tenth (and probably 11th) year, and the Premier League’s legal case still an unknown, a more permanent window may open sooner than expected.
Clubs across the land having been plotting for the moment when a decade of City dominance might end. Chelsea, with their extraordinary investment in the continent’s best young players over the past four windows, hope they will be best placed to pounce.
The 13 youngest starting XIs in the Premier League this season have all been fielded by the Blues across the course of their 13 games, the mean ages between 23 and 24. No one older than 27 has played at all this term. Above all, they have been winning games.
“What we have here is good players, a good squad, young age and this is the reason why I said, for me, for the next years, Chelsea can be an important club in English football,” Maresca explained.
Of course, the Chelsea are not alone with that idea. The futures of Virgil van Dijk, Mo Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold will dictate Liverpool’s next moves, but Jurgen Klopp’s outgoing gift was to refresh a squad that - a few still-performing totems aside - is now comprised mainly of players in their early- and mid-twenties.
Arsenal may already have competed for the title twice, but a frightening number of Mikel Arteta’s key men are either yet to enter, or are just entering, their prime. Riccardo Calafiori is 22, Jurrien Timber, Bukayo Saka, William Saliba and Gabriel Martinelli all 23, and Martin Odegaard, Declan Rice and Kai Havertz 25.
Even Tottenham have been buying up talented young stock like Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray, albeit far less lavishly and with more ground to make up. And as Maresca himself warned, “City will go again, for sure.”
The speed with which Maresca’s prodigies are flourishing, though, makes you wonder whether Chelsea might just have stolen a march.
